#12 TLDR: A Summary of All the Product Strategy Frameworks
Plus, all the step-by-step exercises in one place to help you define your company’s product strategy.
Below are all the exercises from my strategy essays in one place.
November 2024 Update: I have launched a new 3-hour “Product Strategy Workshop” on Maven online. The price is $250, and there are monthly cohorts. Learn more here.
If you'd like to learn more, I offer a self-paced product strategy workshop on Teachable. It includes recorded talks by me and pre-formatted Google Slides you can use to create a product strategy on your own.
- Click here to purchase my self-paced Product Strategy course on Teachable for $200 off the regular $699 price. (You can try the first two modules for free.)
Essay #1: “Delight Customers in Hard to Copy, Margin-enhancing Ways”
Exercise #1: Delight. Describe how your product delights customers today and what will make it even better in the future.
Exercise #2: Hard to copy. Using the Netflix examples above as a guide, list all the ways your product might create a hard-to-copy advantage.
Exercise #3: Margin-enhancing. List all the possible business models and price/plan experiments you will explore over the next few years.
Essay #2: “From DHM to Product Strategy”
Exercise #4: In thinking about your product’s potential “delighters,” hard-to-copy advantages, and business experiments (the three exercises above), what are 4–6 high-level hypotheses you’d like to test in the next year or two?
Essay #3: “The Product Strategy/Metric/Tactic Lockup”
Exercise #5: Outline your strategies, the proxy metric to evaluate progress against each strategy, and the projects you will execute.
Essay #4: “Proxy Metrics”
Exercise #6: Identify your High-Level Engagement metric — the equivalent of monthly retention at Netflix. Now re-look at your work in the Strategy/Metric/Tactic Lockup and re-evaluate your proxy metric for each strategy, using the following questions as a guide:
- Do the proxy metrics adhere to the following structure? Percentage of (members/new customers/returning customers) who do at least (the minimum threshold for user action) by (X period in time).
- Is each proxy metric measurable? Moveable? Not an average? Are you confident that your proxy metric correlates to your high-level metric? Is the metric gameable?
Essay #5: “Working Bottom-up”
Exercise #7: Try the bottom-up approach if teasing out your product strategies is challenging. Create a list of projects you believe are essential, then sort the ideas into different “buckets.” The names of these buckets likely articulate your high-level product strategies.
Essay #6: “A Product Strategy for each Swimlane”
Exercise #8: For each swimlane (pod) in your organization, identify the proxy metric for that effort, key strategies, proxy metrics, and projects in that area. (Typically, this work is done by the product leader for each pod.) Below, I list an example from the Netflix personalization swimlane, circa 2005:
The topline proxy metric for the personalization pod was the “percentage of new members who give at least 50 ratings during their first six weeks with the service.” The team believed that if it could move this metric — a proxy for personalization improvements — they would eventually improve retention. Netflix ultimately proved that personalization improved retention.
Essay #7: “The Product Roadmap”
Exercise #9: For each of your product strategies, outline the projects against each high-level product strategy over the next four quarters. I have included an example roadmap below from Netflix circa 2005.
Essay #8: “The GLEe Model”
Exercise #10: To complete the GLEe exercise for your product and company, ask yourself three questions:
1) What initial product or service enables the company and product to “Get Big” over the first three to five years of its life? Are there trends the product can ride, like Netflix rode the wave of DVD players and e-commerce? What are the trends for your product or company?
2) As you get big, what is the next phase that the product will “Lead?” For Netflix, it was internet video and the opportunity to “Lead streaming.”
3) Once your product establishes a leadership position, how might it “Expand” even further? Given the brand, network effects, economies of scale, and unique technologies your product will establish over time, what is the next wave of growth? What is your equivalent of Netflix’s global expansion?
Reflecting on your answers to the questions above, complete the GLEe model for your product and company:
Product Vision
- Get Big on _______________
- Lead ____________________
- Expand __________________
Essay #9: “The GEM Model”
Exercise #11: When thinking about the needs of your overall company, how do you prioritize growth, engagement, and monetization? What metric will you use to measure each?
As an example, here is the prioritized GEM model for Netflix in 2005:
- Monetization: As measured by lifetime value and gross margin
2. Engagement: As measured by monthly retention
3. Growth: As measured by the year-over-year member growth rate
Determine how you would like to prioritize your organization's growth, engagement, and monetization, then identify the metric you will use to measure each factor.
Final Assignment
Using the frameworks above, create a strategy draft, share it with your colleagues, and ask for feedback. You are welcome to share your presentation with me at gbiddle616@gmail.com—I’d love to hear from you. Please complete the Net Promoter Score survey (link below).
Last words
I hope you enjoyed this series of essays. If you haven’t done it yet, I would love your feedback:
Click here to give feedback — it only takes one minute!
Many thanks,
Gib
Gibson Biddle
November 2024 Update: I have launched a new 3-hour “Product Strategy Workshop” on Maven online. Learn more here.
PS. Here’s an index of all the articles in this series:
- Intro: How to Define Your Product Strategy
- #1 “The DHM Model”
- #2 “From DHM to Product Strategy”
- #3 “The Strategy/Metric/Tactic Lock-up”
- #4 “Proxy Metrics”
- #5 “Working Bottom-up”
- #6 “A Product Strategy for Each Swimlane”
- #7 “The Product Roadmap”
- #8 “The GLEe Model”
- #9 “The GEM Model”
- #10 “How to Run A Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting”
- #11 “A Case Study: Netflix 2020”
- #12 “A Startup Case Study: Chegg”
- #13 “TLDR: Summary of the Product Strategy Frameworks”
- Click here to purchase my self-paced Product Strategy Workshop on Teachable for $200 off the regular $699 price. The course includes recorded talks, PDFs, my essays, and pre-formatted Google Slides so you can complete your product strategy independently. You can also “try before you buy” — the first two modules are free.
